Best Secured Credit Card

[Anonymous]

What, in your opinion is the best secured credit card to have? I am a USAA member so I have access to their secured MasterCard and their secured American Express. Both carry a 9% APR

[Ron1]

The others are First Progress secured MC and US Bank Harley Davidson secured Visa.

Ron.

[Wolf3]

Best is relative to what you can qualify for.    Some are hard to get for rebuilders with bad credit.

I think Capital One is one of the better ones overall.   AF is reasonable, you can get some unsecured CL at application or 6 months, very easy to add deposit.  And it is not too hard to qualify for.

HSBC was also good for me.   It was a big hassle in the beginning, lot of paperwork, and they misplaced the check so it took over 4 months to get the card.  But after I had the card for a year, they gave me 1% cash rewards to keep the card and would have waived future AF but I didn't keep to 2 years.  

[Anonymous]

We have the USAA secured Amex, as well as, the Harley VISA from US Bank, and, we also have a Capital One card.  The USAA Amex and the Capital One cards do not report as secured credit cards on our credit reports, however, the Harley card does.  You can add more money on the USAA card and  the Capital One card any time you like without any hassle but, the Harley card will do a hard pull on your credit report (they'll pull Experian) every time you add more money to that card.  One great feature of the Harley VISA card that I do like is -- when a merchant puts a hold on your account (like when we rent a car) US Bank never keeps the hold on the account whereas, USAA always keeps every kind of hold on the account whether it be a pre-authorization hold from buying gasoline, to a rental car hold -- whatever -- they will keep the hold on for 8 long days!!!  I do like the USAA Amex keeping our deposit in a CD and we've made some money on that in the short time we've had the account. Capital One has been fine but, I don't know anything about any credit line increase of any kind, we have NOT had that experience.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask away -- hope this helps!

[jmcmillan]

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@Anonymous wrote:

You can add more money on the USAA card and  the Capital One card any time you like without any hassle but, the Harley card will do a hard pull on your credit report (they'll pull Experian) every time you add more money to that card.

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They pull a hard every single time? You've seen this with your own eyes? I wonder if all US Bank/Elan cards are like this? I was under the impression they didn't pull hard when you increased the deposit.

This is a turn off.

That's one thing I really, really like my Capital One secured. I can throw money at it anytime I like, in $25 increments, without penalty.